Jim’s Reviews > Travels in Arabia Deserta, Volume 1 > Status Update

I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Beduins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion.

Blood-guiltiness they think to be a misfortune in one's life, rather than a stain in human fellowship. The manslayer who flees to tribe or town, is taken in to the public hospitality; and a lodging will be assigned him if he came so bare that he may hire none: the charitable call him to meat, and the company have no dainty to dip with the homicide hand in the dish.

A pleasure it is to listen to the cheerful Beduin talk, a travellers' school of mere humanity, -- and there is no land so perilous which by humanity he may not pass, for man is of one mind everywhere, ay, and in their kind, even the brute animals of the same foster earth ....

It was now ascertained that the Haj brought the small-pox among them. This terrible disease and cholera-fever are the destruction of nomad Arabia. In their weakly nourished bodies is only little resistance to any malignant sickness.

Marvellous are the fables of the East; and if the truth be in the mouth of many witnesses, it were hard not to believe them; the world is yet full of miracles.

The Arabians inhabit a land of dearth and hunger, and there is no worse food than the date, which they must eat in their few irrigated valleys. The fruit is overheating and inwardly fretting under a sultry climate; too much of cloying sweet, not ministering enough of brawn and bone....